The Critic—as he was called until later finding the name Perry F. Allwright; a glib

nod to peripheral creations—was born from the desire to delineate the disjunction

between living in a home and situating it as a house in the broader currents of

contemporary architecture. One might then say that Allwright was a home birth.

He doesn’t have a mother, but a rather long line of fathers after whom he takes

his appearance, they are (though not necessarily limited to) Reyner Banham, Alan

Colquhoun, Jonathan Meades, Iain Nairn, Colin Rowe, and Ivor Wolfe. In a quite

unfortunate turn of events Allwright never met his fathers, he exists in the bounds

of The Covert House and is left with no purpose but to turn his gaze on it. As

the Critic, contrasting what he sees and feels against what he has been shown,

Allwright is able to critique architecture from the inside, allowing glimpses into

otherwise dormant paradigms of vision.

I embodied Perry, living in the home for a day as The Critic while performing and

taking pictures, as a creative outlet that could explore the spatialised power fields

around the home. Utilising Walter Benjamin’s idea of the ‘dialectical image’, Perry

then produced an article on the house, written and illustrated around images taken

on the day edited onto preexisting architectural photography. By creating a duality

within the images, Perry destabilises the visual language of the photograph and

exposes the subject to temporal discontinuity. Moreover, when the architectural

photograph is taken out of the established convention, it ushers in creativity. To

quote Benjamin; ‘When photography [...] frees itself from physiognomic, political

and scientific interests, then it becomes creative. The lens now focusses on the

ensemble; the photographic poseur appears.’[1]

While Perry F. Allwright is, to a considerable degree, a satirical figure, he certainly

takes his job seriously. If, as Naomi Stead and John Macarthur state, the role of the critic is to ‘stand at the hinge between past and future’ and ‘reveal discrepancies

between what architecture has been, and what it is now’, then Perry’s article on the

Covert House probably fulfils the basic criteria.[2] But something more is gleaned

from his writing. As far as I am a product of the House, and the Critic a product of

me, then the House produces its own criticism.

As Henri Lefebvre articulates in The Production of Space, there is a constitutive

duality in the energy that exists within a living being and the space it occupies. This

might be understood in the living being’s space being shared; within ‘its own space

and the other’s: violence and stability, excess and equilibrium.’[3] As I have assumed

space in the Covert House as a familial home, there exists a tension within me

against the parts that occupy the space in the space’s ‘formal’ image. Along these

lines lies the formulation of Perry F. Allwright. Allwright is the expression of the

surplus energy that has amassed after a decade of living in, viewing, and trying to

understand a space that is full of contradiction and complexity. A continuation of

this thinking might concern the role of mirrored surfaces and mirroring, as explored

by Lefebvre and Jean Baudrillard; in order to know myself ‘I must separate myself

out from myself.’[4] Allwright is revealed through the mirrors of the house and is both literally and figuratively a product of the house.

I would further suggest that as I embodied The Critic, the professional image of The

Covert House became more playful. It went along with the joke and, like a dutiful

younger sibling going along with the nonsense of their elder, became the ‘informal’

stage on which Allwright was able to perform. In creating a pseudonymous

personality for myself in Perry F. Allwright, another persona was rendered, or

revealed, in the image of The Covert House. Producing a criticism of contemporary

domestic architecture with the unique opportunity of writing ‘from within’, has

revealed some interesting metaphysical questions in the way bodies and spaces

interact with one another. One striking complication comes from the idea of

‘producing’, as both The Covert House and myself are ‘products’ of the architects,

my parents. As well as producing an example of domestic architecture, the criticism

here has revealed how the architect-home produces a different kind of ‘domestic

life’, in which the house itself is a part of the family.